Albert Camus Quotes

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed toilet, a person gets to doubting himself. In the hardest times, the stand-at-the-kitchen-sink-and-stare-into-the blackness times, I put on Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time.'

Perhaps I am no one. True, I have a body and I cannot escape from it. I would like to fly out of my head, but that is out of the question.

I'm not good," he said, piercing me with eyes that absorbed all light but reflected none, "but I was worse.

Man is an abyss, and I turn giddy when I look down into it.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do--out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation--look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you'll always find despair.

Do you even know who the enemy is?" "I think... it's me".

Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: 'I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I've never quite sorted them out.'

I've always felt like an alien trapped in a human form. We all do at some time or other; for me it's a permanent state, and I'm still unsure if Earth is a penance or a reward.

I hit this point - I guess you'd say an end of a chapter - where I felt like I kind of did everything. I wasn't interested in music. It was a really strange feeling, and needless to say, it freaked me out a little bit. I really started to go inward and say, 'Hey, what is this about?'

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

I have never met a man who has given me as much trouble as myself.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life.